Shosh must have been waiting for me; out of nowhere, she asked, “Well? Scale of 10 to 10, how much do you regret that?”
I smirked, because I knew that I was about to blow her mind. “The lady I slept with is the Vice Captain at my old precinct.” Her eyes spread wide. “And she offered to make me into a Crimes Against Persons Detective.”
Her jaw dropped.
“Well?”
“Holy shit. Holy shit.” Her face looked like she’d just seen a unicorn piloting a flying saucer made of Lucky Charms marshmallows glued together with spaghetti sauce through a triple rainbow. “You took her up, right? You said ‘yes’?”
“It would be in exchange for her owning my body.”
Her excitement melted into disgust. “Well, fuck that.”
“I figured you’d react along those lines.”
“This is all kindsa wrong.”
“Yeah. It’s better if we don’t talk about it.”
“And that I forget you even mentioned it, if possible.”
I was not thinking about the bite mark on my neck, but it was on my left side, and she was standing to my right, so no controversy ensued.
Yesenia and Judith approached us—on their way back from Rene’s Liquor no doubt—with Pepino Limón Gatorade and Fuego Takis in hand. “So, Sex Cop,” asked the former, making no attempt to hide her amusement, “did you… get paid?”
“Don’t call her ‘Sex Cop’,” growled Shosh.
I ignored her and put on the most enigmatically straight face I could find in my wardrobe; once I had them wondering what kind of surprise I had for them, I removed the money from between my tits and fanned the stack.
While Judith stared in disbelief, Yesenia (for reasons beyond me) broke out into a hearty laughing fit.
“Seni. I know that’s… a lot,” admitted Judith. “But I hafta know… what do you find so funny about it?”
“Oh, nothing, nothing. She gave her a whole thousand is all I find amusing.”
“‘She’?” I asked. “How could you tell she was a woman from where you were standing?”
“I can’t say ‘woman’ is the right word to describe her, but I can tell you that I once counted her among my regulars.”
“Oh. So you knew what she was going to ask me to do with her.”
“Whatever my relationship with her had been, I knew for certain that she would do something different with you, my dear.”
“Okay. Is whatever weird shit she did with you the reason she stopped being your regular?”
She sucked spicy, blood-red dust from her pointer finger and thumb. “She did something to piss me off.”
“Was it something I should worry about her doing to me?”
“Hm. Maybe. Probably. Hell, maybe she’s already done it,” she grumbled, as she crumpled up her empty chip bag. “Reduced the output of your greatest passions—which through trouble, toil, and tongue of dog you’ve built from all the dregs and castoffs of your small, abysmal world—to naught.” ((Oh, sounds like you did not take to the sexually charged shaming as gracefully as I did. I won’t pry.)) She tossed the empty bag into the trash. “I might tell you about it, someday, if you earn my trust—when cops learn how to fly.” She snickered. “First, though, I must highlight your true mystery: ‘Why did she pay you so much for what you did?’”
“Well… I wish I could say it was because I ecstatically indulged her weird desire to treat me like a pathetic loser with no hope for a future and played her nipples like a virtuoso…”
“I’m outta here,” said Shosh, disappearing in a puff of smoke.
“…but she also told me she wanted to help an ex-LEO. Even if my willingness to do freaky psychological things with her was the primary factor, there was certainly significant preferential treatment.”
She snorted in amusement. “Yeah. All these years… she was a pig-fucker.”
I made the deliberate decision not to inform her that my client had been not just any pig-fucker but a pig-fucking pig captain; she didn’t have a need-to-know—in my naïve newcomer opinion—and I didn’t want the sex workers to have a reason to find a way to ban Somers from the street. I knew that an entanglement with her could be extremely useful to me—and maybe, if I played my cards right, beneficial to the sex workers. ((Perhaps I could get her to go a little easier on the people working this street, or blackmail her into spying on the other squads for me… assuming she doesn’t have IA in her back pocket.)) “Yeah.”
“If you’re willing to fuck pig-fuckers, I’ll let you have her as your regular. She’s dead to me. C’mon. Let’s pay your dues.”
“Andy,” interrupted Judith. “Is that a… bite mark on your neck?”
“Oh, yeah. But I don’t mind.”
“Did she ask?”
“No, but she wouldn’t stop apologizing. Almost ruined the mood. I liked it. Don’t worry about me. In fact… I’d like to try it in the privacy of my bedroom. Later.”
“If you say so…”
We walked down the street, passing the hotel, where Yesenia greeted a woman around her age. “Sex Cop, meet Gillian, Guild Treasurer; and Gillian, our new member, Sex Cop.”
Shosh reappeared and hissed, “(I said not to call her that.)”
Gillian—5′5″, blue bob cut, soft features, blue midi skirt and matching blue shirt, a gold hoop earring in each ear and two twisted gold bracelets on each wrist—looked less than pleased to meet me. I offered my hand, but she ignored it. “Good evening, I’m Andrea Bachman. I’m here to pay my dues.” I held onto the confidence instilled in me by my hour of ‘hard work’, and kept my back straight, letting only my neglected hand fall.
“Don’t use your real name, Sweetheart.”
“Oh. Um. Lou Peck—Lou—isa. Louisa.”
“We’ve already got a Louisa.”
“Peckin—Pequeña?”
“Taken.”
“Paugh—Pauline.”
“Also taken.”
“Shit. Hmm… Columb—ia?” Head shake. “Pet—ra… Fal—Falcon?” Another head shake. I tried several not related to my favorite people, eventually coming upon “Serena…”
“Try again, Freckles.”
“(Agh…)” I decided to stop trying actual names and move onto ‘things with positive connotations’, and having just said ‘Serena’, I was primed to find a word that started with the same first five letters: “Serendipity!”
She finally smiled and nodded.
Yesenia, with a delighted smirk, explained to Gillian, “Our Dippity’s a former cop.”
“Is she, now?” asked Gillian with pretend incredulity.
“Tell her about your career’s tragic ending, Dip.”
“I—I worked for Parking Enf—”
“You’re the redhead who drives around in that ridiculous little three-wheeled golf cart thing writing parking tickets.”
“‘Drove’.”
“I don’t believe the guild charter says anything about pigs being allowed in, Seni.”
Yesenia gave her a nod. “But she’s a good, kind-hearted ex-pig, and she’s shown an enthusiasm for plying our much-respected trade. Go ahead, show her the bread.”
I presented my folded-up wad.
“Bullshit,” said Gillian, and Yesenia burst out into laughter. “That’s a stack of ones with a hundred wrapped around it.”
I unfolded and fanned the bills.
“No. You did not make all that in the two hours since the night shift started.”
“I made it in one.”
“Fuck off. Come back when you’ve actually turned a trick, poser.”
“She gave me more than usual because I’m an ex-cop down on her luck.”
“Nah, I could see a john tossing in an extra twenty or thirty for fulfilling a special request or doubling your rate if you do a bang-up job, but this is grade-F baloney. We don’t make that kind of dominatrix money here on the street, not even from pig-lovers. You got that stack from the bank.”
“I saw her get into the trick’s expensive car,” Yesenia explained. “Ex-regular of mine. A major freak, and loaded. This is a lot of money, I won’t deny it, even for that nut job… but it’s not implausible for someone to be willing to pay extra for a batshit kink request.”
“Did you work the job with her?”
“No. I’ve had no business with her since she betrayed me.”
“Then with all the respect I owe you, Seni, you don’t know shit about what she did or did not do behind closed doors.”
“I really do believe Dip when she says she did as our freaky john requested, because I’m intimately familiar with her kinks, and Dippy wouldn’t have known about this lady’s fucked up love for degrading her partners had she not endured it herself.”
“We’ve all been insulted by johns and none of us charge extra for it.”
“I’m not talking about petty slights, Gill. The kind of shit she put her through would have made you refuse even a stack like that—this john gets off on psychologically vivisecting people to find their weaknesses and insecurities before she speaks to them the cruelest words you could ever imagine. Plus, her john’s a biter. Sex Cop is a special kind of hooker—”
“Don’t call her a ‘hooker’ and stop calling her ‘Sex Cop’!” shouted Shosh.
“—if she can bounce back from that hell with the shit-eating grin she was wearing on her face when she showed us what she earned from enduring it.” ((I am… a super whore.)) My head, by that point already fit to pop, grew a size or two more.
Gillian sighed. “If you’re gonna vouch for her… fine. If she ends up being a mole, you’re responsible for the damage she causes us and that means your reputation is on the line. Alright, Dippy Duck, monthly dues for those who wish to join the guild are 7 percent of gross earnings. I’m assuming you only dipped your toes in the danger canal for the membership and don’t intend to do any more work till the end of time, so you can just pay it now and be done with it forever. 70 dollars.”
“Can you make change for a hundred?”
“I could. But I don’t feel like it.”
“Andy, sidebar?” requested Judith, pulling me aside.
“Sure. What’s up?”
“I think you should consider donating your new fortune to the guild.”
“I earned this,” I whined. “It’s my achievement. It’s special to me. I can’t just… give it away. I worked hard for it.”
“Which makes giving it away all the more meaningful.”
((Are you fucking serious?)) “I’m on a fixed income, Judith. My pension is only gonna give me 800 a month, that’s 200 short of my rent, and I don’t know if I have the cojones to ask Geraldine to pay me for doing what the police should be doing for free. I need 3 years of investigative experience to get a private investigator’s license, and despite more than a decade of policing experience, none of it counts towards that requirement because none of it was investigative. I could go to jail for operating without a license, convincing people to hire me is going to be a bitch, and whatever work I can find is going to be under-the-table, which means the IRS might show up on my door one day and then I’ll be up shit creek. I can’t afford my rent without sex work. I need this money. I need it if I’m going to keep a roof over my head.”
“Andy, I…” She struggled. “I feel for you, and I’m not gonna… like, take it away from you. I wouldn’t say that you actually ‘worked hard for it’… but you did work for it, period. The only reason you got so much, though, was because you used to be a cop. It isn’t fair to everyone who’s been working their asses off and risking life and limb on this street for years and will never see that kind of money even after they’ve worked for years more, and if you go around bragging to everyone about how much you made in your first hour of work without any prior experience, you’re going to be even less popular than you already are, capisce?”
“I—I don’t know how I’m going to afford even the most basic necessities if I’m just gonna give the guild everything I make on this street.”
“Not ‘everything you make’. Just… the extra money you’re able to earn thanks to your privilege. Just what you can spare.”
I stared down at my shoes sullenly. “I’m white, so I get paid more than most people here, and I’m less likely to be assaulted. I’m an ex-cop, so the Law is gonna go easy on me, if not help and protect me. I have a desirable body and enjoy sex with strangers. I’m blessed with privilege.” I sighed. “You’re right—I can’t in good conscience keep this. Thank you for pointing this out. Ugh, I hate this…” I returned to Gillian. “Gillian,” I said with a reluctant (if not resentful) sigh, “I have decided to donate all of my earnings from tonight.”
“Wonderful. Are you trying to buy just my trust, or that of all the other sex workers, too?”
“I’m not—I’m not trying to buy anything.”
“You’re trying to wow everyone with your magnanimity,” she said with mock surprise, “and that isn’t just a barefaced attempt to buy popularity?” Deadpan, she added, “Of course it isn’t just a bribe.”
“Judith,” I growled in exasperation. “This was your idea.”
Judith nodded and meekly conceded, “The advice I gave you was solid… solid shit. I apologize.”
“(Thank you,)” I grumbled through clenched teeth.
“Money for followers was J’s idea?” asked Gillian with a sudden lack of condescension.
“If by ‘money for followers’ you mean ‘doing the fair thing—as an interloper who stole a generous john from a more-deserving sex worker to turn a ludicrous profit thanks to being a sister of the blue brotherhood—by relinquishing my earnings for the prosperity of people I was complicit in oppressing at my old job…’ then yes, it was her idea.”
She bit her lip. “Hm. If this was J’s suggestion… sure, your money is welcome in our coffers.” I forced myself to fork over my precious stack of hundreds and she stuffed it into a wallet she pulled from her purse. “Thank you. That leaves us with the matter of your dues.”
I stared. “What are you talking about? I just paid my dues.”
“You made a thousand-dollar donation.”
“Yes. A donation in lieu of dues.”
“Neither of us said the words ‘in lieu of dues’.”
“You want me to pay…”
“70 dollars.”
“…because we didn’t explicitly agree to my dues being included as part of the donation.”
“Precisely.”
“And you’re being serious?”
“I may be wearing makeup, but it is clearly not clown makeup.”
I groaned and rolled my eyes. “(Ah, shit…)” I searched my purse—which was a disorganized mess of multiple tubes of SPF 30 lip balm used down to the nub, the keys to my childhood home that I should have thrown away a decade ago, an empty bottle of sunscreen, a full bottle of sunscreen, pesos from the last time Shosh and I went to Tijuana, hair ties with strands of hair knotted onto them, and banknotes of various denominations including a two dollar bill I’d held onto because I’d drawn a perfectly curled handlebar mustache on the third president of the United States with an extra-fine point felt-tip marker the last time I’d had a good drink or 4—and managed to find a loose pair of emancipators, to which I added 3 irredeemable assholes from the ‘informant compensation fund’ for a total of 70 dollars. “Here.”
She stowed the bills in her wallet and pulled out a card. “It looks like a calling card for a social worker agency—” She studied the front, then handed it to me. “—but the phone number is actually your guild ID number.” I accepted it. “Don’t try to call the number, you’ll just get a random person or business. You don’t need your card to do work, but you will need it for benefits and functions—after your background check clears and you’ve survived your three-month probation.”
((’Santa Virginia Social Workers Group, Membership services: 611-411-0579’, plus a red umbrella in the background.)) With a brief glance I had the number stored in my head; the card itself went into my purse and became lost among the flotsam almost as soon as I had received it. “Got it.”
“Welcome to the guild,” she said. I smiled in relief that I had finally proven myself to them and earned their trust. “But don’t you get it into your head that everyone is just gonna trust you just because you turned your first trick.” I stopped smiling. “All of us know the police are allowed to break the law in the course of an investigation…” She leaned forwards. “…and we are damn good at sniffing out sting operations.”
“Do you trust me?”
“About as much as I trust any other pig… maybe less.”
“Why less?”
She shrugged. “I’m slow to trust. So slow that I trust in reverse.” Yesenia stifled a snicker.
“Well… What can I do to get you to trust me?”
“The harder you try to get on my good side, the more deeply you burrow yourself into the rocky soil of my bad side.”
I sighed frustratedly. “So you’ll never trust me.” I shrugged. “Well. Shit. Do you need to trust me to at least tell me whether you saw Alexander Brookvale the morning he disappeared?”
It was not suspicion that altered her face—rather, it was an intense confusion that knit her brow and narrowed her eyes and turned her stare sidelong. “Why… do you want to know?”
“I’m trying to find him. The police aren’t doing anything, so I’m doing it for them.”
“You’re trying to find him?” she asked skeptically. I had (as far as I could tell) surprised her. I nodded. Gillian pondered for a few seconds, then softly asked, “Wednesday?”
I nodded.
“I didn’t see him. But…” She glanced at Yesenia—who, eyes and teeth shining with satisfaction, winked back at her—then, with just a little curl of one corner of her lips, cautiously continued, “…he was supposed to be a guest speaker at the meeting.”
“So there was a Sex Workers Guild meeting on this street?”
“Yes. 9 o’clock.”
“Which explains why he was here around that time of day, and—” With superb professionalism I contained my excitement… “—it also means there should have been lots of people around when he arrived!” …or at least tempered that excitement a little.
She glanced back and forth between Judith and Yesenia. “A reasonable supposition, Sherlock,” said Gillian, the other corner of her lips threatening to join its sibling.
“How come nobody in the guild told his wife where he was going at the time of his disappearance?” I asked
Gillian’s eyebrow grew half an inch taller. “She… didn’t know where he was?”
“No. He didn’t tell her.”
Yesenia cleared her throat and very innocently asked, “And why, pray tell us, didn’t he tell his wife?”
“He never told her where he was going because he didn’t want the authorities to be able to legally compel her to divulge where he was.”
“‘Told’? ‘Didn’t’? ‘Was’?” I had used the past tense and therefore Yesenia was, at present, tense.
((Well, I don’t actually know he’s dead, even if all signs point to him being murdered and his body discreetly disposed of.)) “I mean—that’s just to say that he’ll probably keep her apprised from now on. Once we rescue him.”
She nodded skeptically. “Of course that wasn’t just a slip of the tongue.”
“I assure you, I believe he’s alive.”
She replied dryly, “I am assured.”
“He’s alive. I’ll rescue him, okay? It’ll be hard since he kept Missus Pasteur in the dark with regards to his operations, but I’ll find him.”
“I didn’t know he was so secretive,” Yesenia said, shrugging resignedly, “If I’d known she didn’t know, I would’ve told her then.”
“That would have saved us a lot of trouble, though the GPS data we uncovered in the process of addressing that trouble is going to be far more useful than just knowing which meeting he was attending. Where was it being held?”
“Gee. I dunno. Maybe it was held at the Torrey Pines. Can you think of anywhere else on this street suitable for a meeting of hundreds of people?”
“Ah. No, I have to admit that I can’t. It was hard to tell without labels for the buildings on the map, but based on his GPS tracker’s history, his last known position appears to be on the curb in front of what I think is the hotel’s entrance—which means somebody at or on their way to the meeting could have seen him. Yesenia, did you see him at all?”
“I would’ve told you by now if I had.”
“Crap. I need to ask everyone here to be sure.”
“Yeah, that would be a good next step to take. You may be helped by the knowledge that there was a raid at fifteen past nine.”
I nodded. “Ah. He might have gotten lost in the shuffle. But the timing… Hm.”
“Let’s think about it once we have more evidence,” suggested Judith. “Thanks, Seni. Let’s get to it, Andy.”
“Good luck, sleuths,” Gillian bid us with a shocking lack of sarcasm and a surprising amount of amusement.
“Let us know if there’s anything we can do to help,” Yesenia said. “Also, you’d’ve saved yourself a lot of pain by simply telling me upfront about why you came here. I’d’ve given you a lot less grief.” She kept her tongue in her cheek as she said this, and the other two covered their snickers.
I blushed, nodded, and tried not to think about how the four of us could have started our night off with a little less friction if only—if only, if only—I had started it by getting down to business and explaining I was looking for Alex Brookvale rather than flopping around hopelessly like a fish on land hoping to convince the seagulls to be nice to her.
Except… as a cop, I would be the seagull, and the sex workers would be the fishes. So… I was more like a seagull trying to convince a school of fishes to give her a chance to prove she was an ally who meant them no harm. But instead (surprise-surprise) a butch cop-witch turned me into a fish and I got to swimming with them.
It turned out that being able to breathe in the vast and fathomless ocean of the oldest career was exactly what I needed—and wanted—all along.